How Facebook Changed the World
The opening scene of David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin's highly and justly anticipated new film on the making of Facebook, The Social Network (loosely based on the proposal for Ben Mezrich's recent book, The Accidental Billionaries) takes place in a Harvard area pub in the fall of 2003. What a long way we've come since then, baby. The internet had been around for the better part of a decade, but MySpace, Wikipedia, and Friendster had barely begun, and YouTube, Twitter, and of course, "The Facebook" (as it was first known) were still not even twinkles in the electronic eye.
Moreover, a person who died in 1993, as opposed to 2003 -- let alone in 1983 or 1973 or earlier -- would have had to have had an imagination beyond Ray Bradbury or Gene Roddenberry even to conceive of the grammar of friendship and social interaction in our wired world of today. Some "nobody" putting random things like, "Stuck in traffic on the freeway today -- this majorly sucks", on a worldwide database, or a non-celebrity blathering about their dating adventures as though they were Jennifer, Angelina, or Julia, would have seemed like the ravings of a madman before social media -- the type of person who says they were Cleopatra or Mahatma Gandhi in their previous life. Who would care? Why would anyone think they would?
And yet, they DO care. Today, the average rejection rate for fiction novels not referred by another author, agent, producer tops 90% at most literary agencies. Yet the guy who put "S--t My Dad Says" on Twitter gets his own CBS sitcom deal. James Frey had to fake it to make it before he was famous, but editors treat the latest bimbo from The Biggest Loser or America's Next Top Model as though they were Joan Didion or Stephen King, throwing book deals and endorsements at them. Legendary soap operas like As The World Turns and Guiding Light finally meet their end -- but everyone from the toughest football player to the most faaaabulous shoe-shopper follows their own favorite "soap operas" of their friends and admirers online, when they're not busy creating their own.
The story focuses on driven young programming student Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg, in a career performance almost on a par with Philip Seymour Hoffman's in Capote, and an excellent sequel to his work as the troubled older son of an almost insanely pretentious professor/novelist father in The Squid and the Whale.) Mark initially starts the idea for what becomes Facebook while drinking and blogging after his girlfriend hands him his walking papers, after one night too many of Mark's self-centered, obsessive monologues and veiled insults. Why, this dark-haired, intellectual Jewish girl even has the temerity to prefer the strapping, tall "rowers" she sees on the Harvard sculling team to him! His revenge stunt, a mean-spirited ripoff of the then-new HotOrNot.com, putting female Harvard students' pictures up two at a time and asking people to vote on who was the uglier/cuter (without the women's permission) got Mark some serious disciplinary action. But it also attracted the attention of star Harvard athletes and business majors Cameron and Tyler Winkelvoss (Armie Hammer, playing both twins thanks to the magic of special effects) and their best friend Divya Narendra (Max Minghella), who are looking for a computer whiz kid to help them start an online dating site for Harvard students.
For someone who looks like he showers and changes clothes on a weekly basis at best, the schlumpfy, defiantly geeky Mark seems as obsessed with class and social status as a character from a Bret Easton Ellis or Curtis Sittenfeld novel. When he agrees with the Winklevosses that the primary appeal of the original concept for Facebook (when it was restricted to students from Ivy League universities) hinged on its "exclusivity," you know he's NOT kidding.
But Mark's plans for revenge against the world go a lot further than his former girlfriend. The Winklevosses are everything he isn't – they are WASPs (or if they are Jewish, they're also blond-haired and thin-nosed, and travel in WASP circles, including British royalty) -- and they're star athletes -- rowers, no less, training for the Olympic team. Zuckerberg strings them along with empty promises and meetings that never happen, while working 24/7 on TheFacebook -- based largely on the Winklevoss's concept and ideas, and then throws them under the bus when he's ready to launch. Even though the Winklevoss' father is loaded, Mark refuses to go to them for seed money, wanting to completely cut out these eager, golden boy goyim out from his little mishpuka. Instead, Mark forms a skeleton company for the rapidly evolving -- and growing -- Facebook concept with his longsuffering best (and only real) friend, Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield, also appearing in the provocative Never Let Me Go, which I'll be discussing here in the coming week.) Saverin is the son of a wealthy Brazilian Jewish family and considerably more popular on campus than the inept, temperamental Mark, and he fronts the seed money for the site.
During the course of the film, Mark is portrayed as so unrelentingly unpleasant, inappropriate, and creepy, you're left to wonder how and why he got that way -- far beyond just the cliche of the socially inept, nerdy computer programmer. (To Eisenberg's credit, he defies the age-old showbiz adage that you want people either to love your character or love to hate him. No one ever loves Mark, not even himself, and yet as twerpy as this little geek seems, it is hard to think of him as actually worth hating for most of the film, precisely because he doesn't have the power to destroy people en masse of a Gordon Gekko, JR Ewing, or Tony Soprano. Or rather, not YET he doesn't.) Certainly history is full of troubled geniuses whom we can admire from afar for their brilliance, but we wouldn't want to have a beer with them. In many ways, Mark is an unfunny version of Jim Parsons' "Sheldon" on The Big Bang Theory. Perhaps he's semi-severely autistic, or has Asperger's. Perhaps we should feel sorry for him, after all.
Perhaps -- but when Mark finally meets the "man of his dreams," in the person of Napster creator Sean Parker (an excellent Justin Timberlake), he finally turns himself into something approaching Charlie Charming by sheer force of will, and is able to dial down his intellectual attack-dog attitude and inappropriate affect. The scenes with Timberlake are beyond homoerotic -- they would not have been out of place in an episode of Queer as Folk or Six Feet Under -- the only thing missing is Timberlake singing "Strangers in the Night." Parker is truly Mark's ultimate sexual fantasy -- an older, richer (at least at first), handsomer, somewhat more graceful computer nerd who can get all the hot girls and parties he wants all the time, and has the respect (or fear) of men old enough to be his father. The scenes with Parker competing for, and inevitably winning, Mark's affections from the yesterday's-news Saverin, are treated exactly the way one would treat a routine love triangle, which seemed Sorkin and Fincher's point.
When his own attorney later confronts Mark, red-handed after a deposition hearing for idea theft (in which he shows not the slightest remorse, or respect for the old-enough-to-be-his-grandpa senior attorneys), Mark brags that the reason "the Wikelvii" hate him is because "for the first time in their lives, things didn't work out the way they were supposed to for them." (Of course they didn't, because Mark went out of his way to make sure they wouldn't.) At this point, Mark's already Bill Clinton or Dick Cheney-sized ego crosses the line into downright sociopathy -- a $1.98 Iago, seeing himself as an instrument of divine social-structure nemesis and retribution. At the very end, the young female attorney shoots back at Mark, in the best of the many trademark Aaron Sorkin one-liners in the film, "You're not really an asshole -- you're just trying so hard to be one."
In the past, movies like Network and Being There (and even the considerably inferior but still relatively well-done The Truman Show and Natural Born Killers) warned of what happens when people live their lives through the media. (Remember Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, who spent more time worrying about the "waxy yellow build-up" on her kitchen floor than she did about war, recession, or her own family, for whom TV commercials were as important as life itself?) Back then, the only audio-visual media worth living through were movies and TV, which were still mostly restricted to the lives and stories of real people and fictional characters far more dramatic or funny or exciting than our own -- they were escapes from our all-too-humdrum lives, not reflections of them.
While it seems ironic that a young man so neurotic and angrily defensive he makes Woody Allen and Philip Roth look like Johnny Carson and Bob Barker would be responsible for a site revolving around friendship, in closer inspection, that may be exactly why he was best suited for helping people to make and maintain friends -- online. Mary Tyler Moore once said that the act of merely reading the list of names at the Oscars or Emmys is more terrifying to her than actually making an Oscar-winning movie or having your own TV show, or even starring on Broadway. "It's the absence of the mask." And now that "everybody is a star", as the old song goes, with more like 15 years than 15 minutes of fame if they play their cards right in their own self-defined roles, we're all "actresses" or "actors" in our own corners of the cybersphere, all in need of our "masks." I am whatever I want you to think I am online, or whatever you want to think of me. You only see my good (or funny) pictures, you only know about me what I want you to know. Even the act of having sex online is divorced from all that icky kissing and pleasuring and actually subjecting yourself to another live human being with their own needs and wants. On the computer, your partner only exists in your mind's eye, looking their best in their best photos, doing exactly what and how you would want him or her to do, in your own private fantasy island.
And therein lies the real point of The Social Network, a film that reboots those old concerns -- now expanded as vastly as the very Internet -- into our brave new world. The movie is about youth and the conquest of the old ways by youth, with no "name" actors besides Timberlake, Eisenberg, and Garfield to carry the picture (the older actors are rounded out by familiar TV favorites like John Getz, Falcon Crest vet David Selby and CSI's Wallace Langham.) For a movie about the birth of the greatest friend-making device in modern history, and the death of the friendships of its creators, The Social Network is a top-notch and rather unsettling metaphoric meditation on what the very meaning of human "friendship" and connection is today.